Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Leading the way was Theresa Duncan and Monica Gesue’s 1995 game Chop Suey, a vivid interactive story narrated by novelist David Sedaris that told the story of two teenage girls who pig out on Chinese food before going on a trippy and wistful exploration through a Midwestern town. Described by Duncan as an attempt to capture “the mystery and beauty of just hanging out at the picnic table for an afternoon”, Chop Suey’s non-directed play and emphasis on discovering the unusual echoed Cyan’s eclectic interactive children’s book The Manhole. While not a sales success, Chop Suey was a critical victory that Entertainment Weekly named as the best CD-ROM release of 1995.

  The sales breakthrough came soon after, when toy company Mattel decided it knew how to make games appeal to girls. “Mattel had been studying girls’ play patterns for many years and understood what would appeal to them. They also understood that their powerful brands could create a huge shift in the market,” said Nancie Martin, director of girls’ software development at Mattel Media. “At that time, games designed to appeal to girls and women didn’t have strong brands behind them and very few of those involved women in the design or production process or took the time to research what might truly be of interest to them.”

  Mattel, of course, had no shortage of brands, most famously its iconic Barbie dolls. Mattel Media made Barbie the focus of its attempts to bring video games to girls. One of its first releases was 1996’s Barbie Fashion Designer. “Andy Rifkin, who’d been a toy inventor for years and headed development for Mattel Media, had an eight-year-old daughter named E.J. who wanted to be able to design clothes for Barbie on her computer,” said Martin. “He came up with the idea of the fashion show and the printed clothing; my team made the production work in a girl-friendly way.”

  Barbie Fashion Designer allowed players to design new clothes for their Barbie dolls and print them out on specially made fabric paper that they could colour in using marker pens. “While it had several outcomes, including a virtual fashion show and the clothes you could print out for your doll, it was not competitive as traditional games of any kind generally are, but it certainly provided its players with a tremendous sense of accoishment,” said Martin.

  Mattel’s game proved to be the breakthrough hit for games aimed at girls. Thanks to the Barbie brand, it encountered little of the retailer scepticism that had made games such as Chop Suey hard to find and its play, finely honed through rigorous testing with children, ensured it became a huge seller. “I believe it sold several million copies all told,” said Martin. “I was not at all surprised by Barbie Fashion Designer’s success; I’d been saying for years that the reason girls weren’t playing video and computer games was that no one was making games they were likely to find appealing. For many girls it was the first time they’d ever played with anything on a computer.”

  Laurel agreed: “It showed games could appeal to girls and still be successful. The problem with it was quite simply that it perpetuated a version of femininity that was fundamentally lame.”

  The games produced by Laurel’s company Purple Moon attempted to push the emerging girl game movement further by focusing on relationships between the characters and an underlying goal of trying to get its target market of eight- to 12-year-olds girls using computers. “I was sick of the industry giving nothing to girls in those days,” said Laurel. “Girls were generally afraid of the technology. Boys had the advantage of gaming to get them involved in the world of computing. I wanted to create the same sort of bridge for girls, using forms and content that would engage them and get them over the hump of putting their hands on the computer.”

  And, thanks in part to a change in retailer attitudes after the commercial breakthrough of Barbie Fashion Designer, Purple Moon’s debut releases Rockett’s New School and Secret Paths in the Forest both sold well. Barbie Fashion Designer’s success also changed game developer and publisher attitudes to female players. The shift could be seen at the 1997 Computer Game Developers’ Conference in Santa Clara, where game industry delegates packed out five sessions on designing games for girls. In one case a group of more than 20 delegates who were refused entry to a packed session forced their way in, desperate to learn how to sell their products to this previously ignored audience.

  But it wasn’t just those making the games who were transforming attitudes. Female players of Doom death matches were taking girl power into cyberspace with the aid of virtual rocket launchers and shotguns. Many of the women who played Doom and similar games online found themselves confronted with rampant sexism from some male players who accused them of being transvestites, claimed that they were inferior players because of their gender or offered comments such as “girls who play online do it because they can’t get a man” or “I’ll give you a rocket to ride”.

  Fed up with the abuse, female players retaliated by organising themselves into women-only teams influenced by the riot grrl feminist punk movement of the early 1990s. These all-womeeams embraced a fierce brand of feminism to challenge the chauvinism they encountered, adopting team names such as Clan Psycho Men Slayers and Crack Whores and forming websites such as Grrl Gamer. They set out to counter the sexism in the only way Doom allowed – by blasting the chauvinists into a shower of bloody lumps. As one grrl gamer, Street Fightin’ Mona of the Crack Whores, put it: “We take pride in ripping them to sorry little shreds.” “The game grrls really took on sexism and gave it a good punch in the nose in the hardcore gaming community,” said Laurel.

  By the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, the sexism faced by those early clans was on the back foot and later female clans, such as PMS Clan, were becoming more about community than retaliation.[3] “The importance of PMS Clan is that it went past the ‘grrl movement’ and female teams and into establishing a complete ‘gamer movement’,” said PMS co-founder Amber Dalton, who played under the name Athena Twin. “Back then we needed to do it on our own as females. We needed to prove we could battle against the best of them. The environment was thick with harassment and prejudice for a long time against women players, but we stuck through it all. Now, women are much more normalised in games since our numbers have thankfully grown and some of the players now have wives and daughters that play as well. People realise we have made our home and no matter what they throw at us we are still going to be here, probably long after they are gone. There is still harassment of course, and always will as it is the nature of online spaces, but at least people are used to us now in the gaming world and many show respect and even admiration.”

  By 2010 PMS Clan had expanded to include men, who play under the H2O banner, and become one of the best-known gaming clans around with more than 2,000 members of both sexes. “We were one of the first gaming groups ever to get mainstream media with features in outlets like Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, ABC News and Fox News,” said Dalton. “That did not just help our organisation, it helped expose competitive gaming to an entire new mainstream audience and grow online gaming.”

  The girl games movement led by the grrl gamers, Mattel, Duncan and Laurel, had forced a significant change in attitudes within the video game industry and among players themselves. Ironically, having helped change attitudes the games produced by the Purple Moon and its peers were later regarded as patronising relics. “I get a lot of crap from both women and men who don’t understand the social context in which Purple Moon and its sister companies came to be,” said Laurel. “They don’t remember the time that girls were afraid of computers, boys dominated computer labs in elementary school and girls thought that tech was not gender-appropriate for them. The conditions that we were trying to address when we started Purple Moon no longer exist.”

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  Meanwhile, Tomb Raider had become an international pop culture phenomenon. Lara Croft had become the face of post-Nintendo gaming, thecially acceptable Mario; a representation of Sony’s desire to present games as cool. Fashion house Gucci gave Tomb Raider publisher Eidos $30,000 to have the virtual icon model its clothes. Eidos then hired
real-life models, including Nell McAndrew, to become the ‘official’ embodiment of Croft and help publicise the game around the world. Health drink Lucozade used the character on its adverts to reposition itself as an energy drink. In 2001 the game became a blockbuster film, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which earned more than $250 million.

  Croft’s success as a pop culture icon helped changed attitudes to video games. “Suddenly video gaming was an acceptable media – it was talked about around dinner tables,” said Heath Smith. “We had got characters like Lara that virtually everybody had heard of, it was talked about and there was no embarrassment about it. There was a massive shift from playing a computer game being deemed as a thing spotty geeky kids did in their bedroom into being a very acceptable part of entertainment.”

  The maturation of video games from toys to home entertainment was aided by game developers’ increasing attempts to cater for older teenagers and adults. These attempts were only partially a response to the popularity of the PlayStation. The US age ratings system introduced following the Senate hearings of 1993 had given publishers the confidence to produce games for older players without fear of retribution. And it was Capcom’s 1996 horror game Resident Evil that was the most significant of all these adult-orientated games.

  Until the early 1990s game developers rarely tried to produce horror games, largely because the limited technology often made the task of scaring players difficult. One of the early attempts was Five Ways Software’s 1985 adaptation of The Rats, James Herbert’s gory horror novel where a plague of mutant rats terrorise London. The game used text adventure scenes where players experienced the attacks of rats from the victims’ perspective, but with the twist that these encounters happened in real-time rather than the usual turn-based approach. Five Ways Software’s subversion of the adventure game format, which is ill suited to real-time action, helped create a sense of panic when the rats attacked as players struggled to survive. The game also had images of rats that would ‘burst’ out of the on-screen page obscuring the text to add to panic. It was an interesting experiment in trying to invoke fear in players but it proved to be a one-off.

  Seven years after The Rats, French game designer Frédérick Raynal created the modern horror game with Alone in the Dark, a nerve-racking 3D horror game for the PC set in a mansion in 1920. Raynal hit on the idea while working on the PC version of the 1990 3D platform game Alpha Waves. “It made me think in 3D,” said Raynal. “While making it I was thinking about what could be the future of adventure games with 3D computed animation and skinned characters.”

  Being a big fan of 1970s horror movies such as the zombie films directed by George A. Romero, Raynal decided to create a horror game: “I was very attractedthose movies. Almost all of them were survival horror movies with just one survivor at the end. I had wanted to do a game with that simple principle since I started using computers: your goal is to survive and exit the house.”

  Aware that the primitive polygon 3D visuals available in 1992 were unlikely to scare players, Raynal focused on using the unexpected and the anticipation of danger to instil fear in the player. “The main idea was to implement inevitable death from what the player does all the time – playing and controlling the character,” he said. “When the floor of the first corridor fell out from under you, then you were always afraid of walking. One of the first doors you opened unveiled a monster just behind, so then you asked yourself what will happen with every door.”

  Alone in the Dark became a huge seller for its publisher Infogrames and turned Raynal into one of France’s foremost game designers, but it would take Resident Evil to really establish horror as a distinct type of video game. While it had many similarities with Alone in the Dark, the Japanese team that made Resident Evil was in fact trying to update Sweet Home, a 1989 role-playing game for the Nintendo Famicom based on a Japanese horror film of the same name. “It was more influenced by the basic structure of Sweet Home,” said Jun Takeuchi, who worked as an animator on Resident Evil before going on to produce later editions of the series. “The fact that a western-style house is where the game takes place, there are traps and problem-solving sections in the game and other such components.”

  But while Sweet Home’s simple 2D visuals struggled to convey a sense of horror, Resident Evil’s tale of zombies created by a genetically engineered virus made fear and frights its raison d’etre. “Movies were a big influence in the area of creating the atmosphere of terror. We learned a lot from the skills and techniques that had been cultivated by the movie makers of yesteryear,” said Takeuchi. As well as absorbing horror film techniques, such as claustrophobic camera angles and surprise attacks, Capcom’s team made the need to avoid combat and a sense of vulnerability core to the experience by strictly rationing the amount of ammunition available for the player’s gun and only allowing the game to be saved at a few spread out locations. “The game was designed to create fear via movement within the game itself, therefore being able to save only at specific points in the game heightens the sense of fear,” said Takeuchi. “When a player is unable to invoke the special privilege of ‘continue’ the player is psychologically destabilised and therefore in a more vulnerable position and more susceptible to the feeling of fear. In other words, constraining the save option to certain parts of the game is one of the tools for enhancing the feeling of fear.”

  Resident Evil’s nail-biting action and global success encouraged the arrival of more horror games. Many stuck to the b-movie feel of Resident Evil, but others sought to move beyond the Romero zombie movie template. Konami’s Silent Hill was a particularly significant development. Instead of taking its inspiration from the gory shock movies of the US, its Japanese developers absorbed ideas from the new wave of Japanese horror films, which tend to concentrate on psychological fear rather than shocking images and the crossover between natural and supernatural worlds.

  Silent Hill cast players as Harry Mason, a father searching for his adopted daughter in the fog-shrouded and abandoned Midwestern town of Silent Hill. The town itself reflected the emotional turmoil of the lead character with its decaying buildings, horrific scenes and disturbing monsters that echoed the unsettling visions of painter Francis Bacon. And while the player did have opportunities to fight monsters, Silent Hill was primarily a game where the horror manifested itself in the town’s oppressive and haunting atmosphere, which was enhanced by the screeching radio interference that warned players of approaching creatures.

  From these two templates the horror game became an increasingly important and diverse genre on video game consoles. Japanese publisher Irem’s 2002 PlayStation 2 release S.O.S.: The Final Escape was an especially innovative take on the genre, swapping the threat of monsters for the dangers of natural disasters. “Since I grew up on the novel and movie Japan Sinks and the cartoon Survival, I wanted to make the game with a theme of disaster,” said Kazuma Kujo, producer of the game.[4] “Additionally, I had a chance to hear about the horror of disaster from my seniors and friends during the big 1995 earthquake at Kobe. A combination of those things inspired me to make a game about surviving a disaster.”

  While fear remained paramount in the game, the earthquake theme meant that the monsters or enemies that were usually the causes of those fears were absent. “Since the disaster, especially the actual earthquake, is not visible, it required some creative thinking to express it through the screen,” said Kujo. “For example, we combined the small shakes and big shakes to express the approaching earthquake.”

  While Irem explored the fear of acts of god, British game developers Rockstar North took the horror genre in a darker direction with 2003’s Manhunt, which put the player in the shoes of a convicted murderer who is forced to kill by the director of a snuff movie. Manhunt revolved around its murders, which ranged from suffocating people with plastic bags to clumsy beheadings with meat cleavers, and rewarded players for the brutality of the executions they carried out. The graphic deception of murder and the player’s complicity in the c
arnage made Manhunt the one of the most controversial game of the first decade of the 21st century, earning bans in Australia, Brazil, Germany and New Zealand. In the UK, national newspapers linked Manhunt to the 2004 murder of 14-year-old Stefan Pakeerah in a Leicester park by his 17-year-old friend Warren Leblanc. The police and the courts dismissed the link, not least because it was Pakeerah not Leblanc who owned the game. Leblanc was jailed for a minimum term of 13 years for the murder.

  The biggest development in horror games during the first decade of the 2000s, however, was 2005’s Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 4 saw Capcom reassess the whole horror genre and take it in a more action-based direction. The lumbering zombies of the original games were replaced with fast-moving villagers under the control of a parasitic organism. “Familiarity is the enemy of evoking the sense of fear and terror,” said Takeuchi. “We need to keep reinventing the fear aspect of the game, so sometimes we need to go against the grain of the Resident Evil concept itself to keep this sense of the unknown, ergo fear, alive. I think Resident Evil 4 has cleared many of these problematic issues of familiarity and loss of the sense of fear in very eloquent ways. We managed to destabilise the expectations of the players by changing the speed of the zombies, but were able to retain the essence of Resident Evil throughout.”

  Resident Evil 4 re-energised the horror genre leading to a spate of more action-orientated games, such as 2006’s Dead Rising and 2008’s Left 4 Dead, a multiplayer-focused game where players work together to try and escape from an onslaught of fast-moving zombies. Resident Evil 4’s viewpoint, similar to having a camera perched over the right shoulder of the player’s character, was also influential, providing a way to include the player’s character on screen without blocking players’ view of the action. The camera angle quickly resurfaced in titles such as 2006’s Gears of War.

  The idea of player vulnerability as a play mechanic was also explored in another genre that the PlayStation helped establish as part of the video game lexicon: the stealth game. Although early games such as 1981’s Castle Wolfenstein and submarine simulations such as Silent Service revolved around stealth, the emergence of the PC game Thief: The Dark Project and the PlayStation titles Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins in 1998 developed the concept enough to cement it as a distinct genre. Although the feudal Japan-based Tenchu: Stealth Assassins was first to be released, it was Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid that really became the focal point for the genre.